Bluesky has grown by 2 million customers — about 15% — since Donald Trump gained the U.S. election final week. However the rising social platform isn’t simply performing as a refuge for left-leaning X customers who’re upset in Elon Musk’s alliance with the president-elect. A group of Taylor Swift followers, or Swifites, has additionally laid its basis on the decentralized social app.
Nearly 13,000 individuals on Bluesky have signed up with a “swifties.social” area title, indicating their involvement within the Taylor Swift fan group. Different fandoms for artists like Beyoncé (about 900 members) and BTS (about 4,500 members) have additionally emerged.
These fan-driven domains, which operate inside the principle Bluesky social server, got here from a challenge that Bluesky developer Samuel Newman made in Might 2023, earlier than he was employed by the corporate. (Newman was additionally behind the third-party shopper Graysky earlier than he acquired a job at Bluesky.) Newman’s instrument permits anybody to say subdomain handles from a site that you simply personal. For instance, Newman purchased “kawaii.social,” which now has about 450 members. Utilizing his instrument, we might technically snatch up “techcrunch.kawaii.social” as our area, however alas, which may not be as in step with our model as our present “techcrunch.com” deal with.
“It’s taken off in ways I didn’t expect. I originally made the tool thinking people might want a ‘bsky.london’ handle or something like that, but it turns out that the handle is a great signal for what kind of account you are, and stan accounts absolutely love being able to self-identify themselves like that,” Newman informed TechCrunch through Bluesky DM.
The swifties.social area didn’t see a lot progress at first, with about 2,000 customers becoming a member of till August 2024, when X was quickly banned in Brazil.
“Bluesky got an enormous influx of Brazilian users, including many Swifties,” Newman mentioned. “The tool went viral, jumping to nearly 8,000 handles claimed. Then, after the election, yet another wave of Swifties arrived and the tool went viral again, jumping to 12,800!”
That wave of progress from Brazilian customers was when Newman added handles for BTS followers (military.social) and Beyoncé followers (beyhive.social).
Within the grand scheme of issues, customers with these fan domains solely make up a tiny fraction of Bluesky’s 16 million customers (and counting). However fan communities are sometimes what makes a social community run; within the early 2010s, Tumblr boomed partially attributable to fandoms for TV exhibits like “Supernatural” and “Doctor Who,” in addition to bands like One Route. Even when a group is small, these cohorts are usually very lively social media customers, and Bluesky up to now has prided itself on its capability to take care of extremely engaged customers.
“We … have a higher percentage of posters than most social sites, which follow a 90-9-1 pattern of lurkers-commenters-posters. We haven’t dipped below ~30% posters,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber wrote in a publish on Tuesday.
